The BBC is at the centre of a row after a leading university accused it of putting its members at risk by sending a team of undercover Panorama journalists into North Korea as part of a student trip.

The team of three, which included reporter John Sweeney, travelled to the
secretive state last month as part of a visit by members of a London School
of Economics student society.

The university has said the genuine students had been “deliberately misled” by
the BBC and were put in “serious danger” by the presence of the journalist.

It has accused the Corporation of taking an “unacceptable” risk. Had the
journalists' identity been discovered by the North Korean authorities, the
entire group could have been arrested and faced punishment.

While in North Korea, the BBC filmed undercover footage that will be broadcast
in Panorama on Monday. The Corporation has said the programme will go
ahead, despite the university asking for it to be withdrawn. It insists
students on the trip were aware of the BBC's presence before travelling to
North Korea.

This weekend, LSE officials sent a letter to all members of the university,
deploring the tactics used by the BBC to get its journalists into North
Korea.

As John Kerry arrives in Beijing, China continues to flout United Nations sanctions in order to prop up Kim Jong-un's regime, The Sunday Telegraph can reveal.

There was never any clue from the outside that a cheap apartment on the 16th floor of a tower block in the Chinese city of Dandong was in fact North Korea's lifeline to the outside world.

But for nearly a decade, 1602 Huiyou Gardens was the Chinese office of an organisation described by American investigators as a "key financial node in North Korea's weapons of mass destruction apparatus".

Since it founded its Chinese branch in 2004, the Kwangson Bank, otherwise known as the Foreign Trade Bank, helped channel billions of pounds of valuable foreign currency to Pyongyang, money that was used to finance North Korea's nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles programmes.

So when the Chinese authorities shut down the branch office last month, 10 days after the United Nations Security Council imposed fresh sanctions on North Korea, it seemed a clear sign that Beijing had finally lost patience with Kim Jong-un's truculent, unpredictable, and increasingly belligerent regime.

"It is a big hit for North Korea! China is implementing the UN Security Council resolution," wrote one Chinese government-owned newspaper in Hong Kong.

Months of increased tension at the Guantanamo Bay prison boiled over into a clash between guards and detainees Saturday as the military closed a communal section of the facility and moved its inmates into single cells.

The violence erupted during an early morning raid that military officials said was necessary because prisoners had covered up security cameras and windows as part of a weekslong protest and hunger strike over their indefinite confinement and conditions at the U.S. base in Cuba.

Prisoners fought guards with makeshift weapons that included broomsticks when troops arrived to move them out of a communal wing of the section of the prison known as Camp 6, said Navy Capt. Robert Durand, a military spokesman. Guards responded by firing four "less-than-lethal rounds," he said.

As the Syrian civil way went into its third year this week, signs abounded of increasing readiness for the use of chemical weapons on both sides of the conflict.

Since February, the US, Israel, Ankara and Amman have been aware of Bashar Assad’s resolve to override their threats and resort to deadly poison gas if the rebels closed in on the heart of Damascus. On April 3, an unnamed Syrian army officer made the warning clear. By continuing to advancie on Damascus, he said, “the rebels and their leaders” were assured of “certain death.”

At about the same time, debkafile reported exclusively that the Syrian ruler had ordered protective suits for chemical warfare and gas masks distributed to the 4th and 3rd Divisions defending the capital. Tank commanders were told to activate their filtering systems against chemical and biological agents.

Protective suits have since been distributed to the Syrian army units fighting in southern Syria and the Golan, the enclave divided between Syria and Israel by the 1974 ceasefire that ended the Syrian war of attrition after the Yom Kippur War.

There is serious shortage of emergency shelters near the inter-Korean border, especially in Incheon, Gyeonggi Province, and Gangwon Province.

Emergency management authorities on Tuesday said that the country needs a total of 380 shelters in the border regions, but by the end of last year only 62 had been completed.

The government hastily built more shelters after the shelling of Yeonpyeong Island in 2010. At the time, the Ministry of Public Administration and Security spent W53 billion (US$1=W1,139) to build new shelters in the five islands in the West Sea off the North Korean coast.

The National Emergency Management Agency also conducted a study from April to August in 2011 to establish how many shelters are needed in the border regions and arrived at the figure of 380. It built 56 of them the same year but only another 17 in 2012. This year it plans to build another 20. At this rate it would take over a decade to build all 380.

Ants know when an earthquake is about to strike, researchers have discovered. Their behavior changes significantly prior to the quake and they resume normal functioning only a day after it.

Gabriele Berberich of the University Duisburg-Essen in Germany presented these findings on Thursday at the European Geosciences Union annual meeting in Vienna according to LiveScience.

Berberich and her colleagues discovered that red wood ants preferred to build their colonies right along active faults in Germany. They counted 15,000 ant mounds lining the faults. These faults are fractures where the Earth violently ruptures in earthquakes.

Guards swept through communal cellblocks at the Guantanamo detention camp on Saturday and moved the prisoners into one-man cells in an attempt to end a hunger strike that began in February, a U.S. military spokesman said.

"Some detainees resisted with improvised weapons, and in response, four less-than-lethal rounds were fired. There were no serious injuries to guards or detainees," Navy Captain Robert Durand said in a news release.

He said the action was taken because detainees had covered windows and surveillance cameras to block the guards' view into the cellblocks.

Germany said European banking union will require changes to EU law, in a call that could slow completion of the plan designed to underpin the euro currency.

Speaking after a meeting of European Union finance ministers on Saturday, Germany Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said the EU's Lisbon treaty had to be changed to allow common rules on shutting troubled banks - a central element of the union.

Four Italian journalists kidnapped and held in Syria since April 4 had been freed on Saturday, Italy's interim Foreign Minister Mario Monti said in a statement.

Monti's statement gave no details about who had taken the reporters hostage nor any regarding their release, but state news agency ANSA said they were now in Turkey and would return to Italy on Saturday evening.

Ricucci told ANSA by telephone that the group had been held by an armed Islamist group, that none of them were wounded and all were in good health.

Moscow said on Saturday that Washington had dealt a severe blow to relations by barring 18 Russians from the United States over alleged human rights abuses, and in retaliation it banned 18 Americans from entering Russia.

U.S. President Barack Obama's administration had on Friday issued a list of 18 people subject to visa bans and asset freezes in the United States under the Magnitsky Act legislation passed by Congress late last year.

"Under pressure from Russophobic members of the U.S. Congress, a powerful blow has been dealt to bilateral relations and mutual trust," a Russian Foreign Ministry statement said.

A woman and two children were killed and 16 people injured in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo on Saturday in what an anti-government violence monitoring group said was a gas attack by Syrian government forces.

Rami Abdelrahman, head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, cited witnesses as saying that two gas bombs had been dropped from an army helicopter.

Doctors in the town of Afrin, where the injured were taken, told the Observatory that victims had "hallucinated, vomited, had excess mucus and felt their eyes were burning".

Reuters cannot verify such reports from Syria due to severe reporting and security restrictions.

Portuguese and European officials are demanding renewed social cuts amid a crisis unleashed by a ruling of Portugal’s constitutional court, declaring European Union (EU)-mandated budget cuts unconstitutional. These cuts were central to the governments’ €78 billion loan agreement with the “troika” (the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund, and the European Central Bank) in 2011.

The Court deemed unconstitutional four of the nine measures in the government’s 2013 budget: the suspension of civil servants’ holiday pay, a levy on unemployment and sickness benefits and cuts to pensions and teachers’ salaries.

The court ruled that these measures discriminated between the public and private sector. The measures account for about €1.3 billion of cuts planned this year, more than 20 per cent of the total, and will increase the budget deficit to about 6.4 percent of GDP, compared to the agreed 5.5 percent target.

Last week, in a televised speech to a meeting of the National Management Board of the ruling Popular Party (PP) government, Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy tried to paint a rosy future for Spain.

“This year will still be hard, particularly in the first half, [but] in 2014 the Spanish economy will be clearly growing, and we will start to create jobs,” he claimed. This week, European Union commissioner for economic and monetary affairs Olli Rehn presented a report on Spain’s economic situation far less upbeat and emphasising the continuing “imbalances” in order to demand more austerity measures.

Rajoy said his government’s principal objective was generating employment. “That is the aim, the most important one, and nobody should forget it,” he said. The principle of budget stability, he continued, has worked well, and the situation will improve provided the public deficit is reined in.

Intensified surveillance in both humans and animals will answer important questions about the H7N9 virus that is currently affecting humans in China, according to Timothy M. Uyeki, MD, and Nancy J Cox, PhD, both of the Influenza Division of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.

“We cannot rest our guard,” they wrote in an editorial published in The New England Journal of Medicine. “The coming weeks will reveal whether the epidemiology reflects only a widespread zoonosis, whether an H7N9 pandemic is beginning, or something in between.”

As of Thursday, there have been 43 patients with laboratory-confirmed H7N9 and 11 deaths. There has been no evidence of human-to-human transmission, but more than 1,000 close contacts of those with the virus are being monitored.

Chinese health officials have confirmed the first case of H7N9 infection in the capital Beijing, the official Xinhua News Agency said Saturday.

According to Xinhua, a 7-year-old girl in Beijing was infected with H7N9, a lesser-known strain of bird flu, making it the first such case in the Chinese capital and raising the total number of infections in the country to 44.

The case was confirmed following a test by the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention early on Saturday.

Officials with an Arkansas water supplier asked ExxonMobil Thursday to move an oil pipeline away from an area that drains into the main source of drinking water for Little Rock to avoid contamination in the future.

The move by Central Arkansas Water's Board of Commissioners comes nearly two weeks after ExxonMobil's Pegasus pipeline ruptured and spilled thousands of barrels of oil in Mayflower, a small city about 25 miles northwest of Little Rock.

ExxonMobil has said the March 29 spill didn't affect Mayflower's drinking water supply, which comes from a lake about 65 miles away and is managed by a different supplier.

Two women have been shot at New River Community College housed in a mall in southwest Virginia, inset. Police have arrested an 18-year-old student Neil Macinnis a Computer Graphics and Web Design senior at the school, pictured. The shooting comes four days before the 6th anniversary of the Virginia Tech massacre.

Family attorney Robert Allard says he plans to seek homicide charges against Audrie Pott's alleged attackers, accusing the teens of driving the girl to suicide by first savagely assaulting the 15-year-old California sophomore while she was unconscious and then circulating a photo of the abuse online. Lawyers representing the three underage suspects released a statement following their arrests claiming that Audrie's suicide had nothing to do with their clients.

A jury took less than an hour to convict a female lawyer who worked with an anti-gay Christian group for abducting a teenage girl and forcing her to have sex on camera while on bail for child pornography charges.

Lisa Biron, 43, did not display any emotion as the verdict was read during the January court appearance in New Hampshire.

She faces a minimum 25 year sentenced when she is sentenced later this month.

A Christian worker who claims she was sacked from her job at Heathrow following a 'race hate' campaign by 'Muslim extremists' today vowed to take her unfair dismissal case 'all the way to Luxembourg' to the European Court of Justice.

Nohad Halawi allegedly weathered cruel rumours that she was 'anti-Islamist,' on top of a systematic catalogue of intimidation that included telling the 48-year-old that she would go to Hell if she did not convert to Islam.

Halawi, previously a beauty consultant for luxury cosmetics brand Shiseido, was then booted out of her 13-year-long job in Heathrow Airport's World Duty Free shop, after going to her seniors with concerns about the verbal tirades she was subjected to.

A police officer was paid £10,000 compensation after falling off a chair on London Underground premises, it was revealed today.

In total Transport for London has been forced to pay out £4.76million to people injured on tube trains, buses and train station platforms across the capital over the last three years.

Details of the award to the British Transport Police officer were released after it emerged Norfolk Police officer Kelly Jones is suing a petrol station owner for £50,000 because she allegedly tripped while responding to a 999 call.

Dominic Francis (top left), 25, a student at Oxford University's Ruskin College, is behind a planned protest during the former prime minister's funeral that is expected to see people deliberately turn their backs on the cortege as it passes through the capital. Today police are focusing on Trafalgar Square amid fears thousands of protestors - including members of the anarchist group Black Bloc (pictured at a TUC protest in London last October) - will turn out to 'celebrate' Lady Thatcher's death.

The congressman at the center of an international furor over North Korea's nuclear capabilities is one of the leading voices in the House of Representatives against cutting the budget for missile systems.

Republican Representative Doug Lamborn, whose Colorado district is a center for U.S. missile defense, made headlines around the world on Thursday after he quoted the Defense Intelligence Agency as saying North Korea likely had a nuclear bomb that could be launched from a missile.

Senators crafting an immigration bill have agreed that foreigners who crossed the U.S. border illegally would be deported if they entered the United States after December 31, 2011, a congressional aide said on Friday.

The legislation by a bipartisan group of senators would give the estimated 11 million immigrants living in the United States illegally a way to obtain legal status and eventually become U.S. citizens, provided certain measures are met.

But of the unauthorized immigrants, those who entered after the December 2011 cut-off date would be forced to go back to their country of origin, said the aide, who was not authorized to speak publicly because the bill is still being negotiated.

Nearly 5,000 of the swallows raised by a company in central Ninh Thuan Province have died for unknown causes, but eight samples of them have been found contracting the H5N1 avian flu virus, authorities reported.

Deputy chairwoman of the province’s Phan Rang-Thap Cham City, Nguyen Thi Hue, said more than 4,900 of the flock of about 10,000 swallows raised by city-based Yen Viet Trading and Service Co., Ltd. have died over the past two weeks, from March 26 to April 11.

The company has been breeding swallows at Thanh Binh Theatre on Thong Nhat Street in the city.

A notice for the prevention of H7N9 is seen at the center for harmless treatment of animals in Shanghai, east China, April 10, 2013. As the only place where provides with harmless treatment of animals in Shanghai, the center works around the clock and handles about 40 tons of poultry died from culling operations daily.

Bird flu turned fatal for a 52- year-old Shanghai woman whose lungs became so damaged that she began to suffocate, causing her vital organs to rapidly shut down, doctors in China said.

The retiree became ill March 27, with a fever that soared as high as 40.6 degrees Celsius (105.1 Fahrenheit), doctors at Huashan Hospital in Shanghai wrote in a report on the case in the journal Emerging Microbes & Infections. Treatment with intravenous antibiotics, steroids, antibody therapy, and mechanical ventilation failed to help, and she died April 3.

Her illness, the first H7N9 avian influenza case to be described in a medical journal, highlights the seriousness of the new strain, which has sickened at least 38 people in eastern China, killing 10, in the past two months. Hospital doctors didn’t know the cause of the woman’s illness when she was admitted. Tests identified the H7N9 virus after she died.

“What they had here was a seriously ill patient and they didn’t know what was going on,” said Dominic Dwyer, director of the Institute of Clinical Pathology and Medical Research at Sydney’s Westmead Hospital, who reviewed the case report. “This person was so ill, they just threw everything” at her.

West Bengal has reported its first swine flu case after a gap of three years, experts in Kolkata confirmed on Thursday.

"One sample has tested positive so far. The health department has already issued circulars and notices to various hospitals across districts," Sekhar Chakrabarti, director of National Institute of Cholera and Enteric Diseases, said.

The Government has hit back at claims it is to blame for the latest measles outbreak - now the largest the UK has seen for more than a decade.

Andrew Wakefield, the former doctor who caused the MMR scare 15 years ago by linking the vaccine with autism, said ministers were putting the importance of their vaccination programme above the welfare of children.

He told The Independent that the "British Government is entirely culpable" for the outbreak and accused ministers of "putting price before children's health".